Tag Archives: Urban History

Something I’ve always found quite interesting is to look at the phases of development a city has had. How big was the city in 1900? Where developed prior to the First World War? How about between the wars? Why did development occur in those places first rather than elsewhere? How do the street patterns, building type and general feel of an area reflect the times it was built in?

Exploring this process of urban development through analysing the city is an interesting process. I’ve already talked about the oldest part, which probably dates from the 1600s, or perhaps even earlier. So that forms phase one of our city’s development, perhaps generally where things were at in around 1750 – so still a fairly small place, although pretty intensively built up.

The first phase of development is the purple area in the picture above.

By say 1850, railways and the industrial revolution has really started to change our urban places. Typically the need for walls had stopped, plus cities were struggling to fit within those boundaries anyway. Here we also see the earliest stages of New Haven developing in the west, highlighting that its urban core also dates from a pretty early date. Our main area has grown fairly considerably and would have perhaps had a population pushing 250,000 – all pretty tightly packed in as most people needed to live within walking distance of where they worked. We also see the use of the port becoming increasingly important:

The third stage is where the city would have reached at 1900. This is a fairly arbitrary cut off date in a sense, but shows us that the second half of the 19th century continued to be a time of really rapid urban growth. This pre-1900 area forms a pretty distinctive “core” to the current metropolitan area, we see development following the rivers (for transport purposes and perhaps because industry wanted to be there too) and also following where some of the metro lines are today, telling us that these lines were probably some of the earliest, precipitating urban development around them:

The fourth phase, which is where the city would have been by the time of the Second World War, indicates a further level of quite extensive development during the first half of the 20th century. Some master-planned communities would have followed urban trends at the time, like the Garden City movement. This is perhaps most obvious in the suburb of Solaris, which I will dedicate a post to in the future. Development has also taken place along the harbour, as perhaps the rise of the automobile meant that people were no longer strongly required to live near a train station or tram line to get to work, although the extensive Metro network the city had at this point probably meant lower than average car ownership rates (sort of like New York in the USA). Population is likely to have hit a million in the early years of the 20th century, and perhaps has reached 1.5 million by World War II – indicating slower growth since that time (remembering that the current population is around 2.7 million).Obviously everywhere not shaded has developed since the Second World War. The really large chunk in the west probably was built in the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps with significant government intervention to boost housing stocks after the war. In more recent times, development has stretched up some of the valleys, but has also probably been largely through intensification as the area’s geography makes further expansion very difficult (except for in the far northeast, which is just getting a bit too isolated).

Compared to a lot of cities, this one certainly grew a lot in the 1850-1950 period, perhaps reflecting my desire to have a city that is shaped by urban trends during this time. I suppose as a matter of practicality too, with such an extensive Metro rail system, I need an urban core that’s very dense and also quite large – which realistically requires a lot of development to have occurred during the 1850-1950 period.

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It’s obvious that, in every city, there is a place where “it started”. Typically over time that remains as the heart of the city, becoming its centre or central business district (CBD). New York was founded on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, London was a Roman settlement, with its oldest parts still contained with what’s now known as “the City”.

Generally, there’s a geographic reason for a city to locate in a certain place. Whether it be the site of harbours that shelter boats, rivers that provide for navigation, hills that allow for good surveillance of what’s around you, or a lake that provides excellent fresh water, it’s generally no accident that a city ended up locating where it is. In more recent times we have seen cities located in more arbitrary places – like Brasilia and Canberra, which seem to have no real specific point of being where they are, but were created from scratch as the capital city of their country in the 20th century.

I’m generally someone who prefers a more ‘organic’ approach to city building than you see in Brasilia or Canberra. There’s something about how planned an unnatural a place like Brasilia is that I find somewhat scary (image from here):

So when I thought about the natural starting point for my city, geography had to play a role. But did I imagine this place as originally being a mercantile port? Or a walled-in political centre? Or a trading post along a river that grew and grew and grew? Would it have emerged alongside a harbour, a river, at the top of a hill? When would it have been founded? In the last two hundred years? Back in the “early modern period”?

I found myself strongly influenced by the medieval cores of the many cities I visited in Europe in 2008. The unplanned structure, the pedestrian focus, the high intensity, the beautiful buildings, all seemed to combine to create the kind of environment the middle of a city should have.
There are remnants of the wall that used to surround the “ancient” parts of the city known as Ancien and Chatelet (clearly a bit of French influence there). There’s a castle and a basilica, which would probably be pretty spectacular buildings and major tourist attractions for the city. Streets shaded in grey are pedestrian only, suggesting an urban core inside the walls that’s set aside for pedestrians only (probably due to street width). Perhaps in the early morning delivery vehicles are able to carefully make their way along such streets.

The approximate dimensions of this area are around 2 km east to west and 1.5 km north to south, creating a total area of around 3 square kilometres. By way of comparison, the two lines in the aerial photograph of Paris represent similar lengths: 1.5 km vertically and 2.0 km horizontally:

A few questions obviously remain about what this area would be like. How much of its original built form was retained? Is it really realistic for such a large part of a city to be car-free? Would this part of the city be able to function as a “proper” area, or would it pretty much become like a theme park for tourists: dominated by gift shops, restaurants and visitor accommodation (like old parts of Quebec City, or pretty much the whole of Venice, are)? Plus, of course, I haven’t quite answered the original question of this post: why is it where it is? Perhaps there’s a hill here, and the city was built on that hill for fortification purposes, but is still relatively close to the sea for access to the outside world?

More fundamentally, it raises the interesting question of what happens to extremely old and intact parts of our cities. Do we adopt the Paris approach and create new business districts elsewhere – like has been done with La Defense? Or do we adopt a London approach and integrate the modern into the very old parts of our cities – in a generally very careful manner. Would we want central Paris to be punctuated by modern high-rise buildings? Would central London be better without the high-rise modern buildings?

While this city has probably taken the “Paris approach” more than the “London approach” (albeit to a lesser extent as the modern downtown is fairly nearby), I’m not necessarily saying that’s the absolute best approach. I’m not actually sure whether there is a right and wrong answer here.